Podcasts

1-31-2015

An archive of all of our episodes. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, ACast, and Stitcher here.

When Angela’s sprawling, keenly observed debut novel, “The Turner House,” dropped last spring, it won rave reviews in big, important outlets like The New York Times. The novel picks up in 2008, with the housing market in full swoon. The many siblings of the huge Turner family in Detroit are fighting over what to do with the home in which they grew up: their matriarch is elderly and fading; the house is practically worthless. The novel hopscotches across the decades, telling the story of the Turners and the big, messy city they call home.

Spike Lee’s forthcoming flick, “Chi-Raq.” is a satire about a woman who rallies the other women in her neighborhood to stop having sex with their male lovers in order to use it as leverage and get them to Stop The Violence™ . Oddly enough, that happens to the very same plot of a low-budget 2003 movie called “A Miami Tail” starring Trina. (Actual tagline: “Until they lay down their guns, this gang ain’t banging!”) In this mini-episode, G.D. sat down to watch and discuss “Tail” with Akoto Ofori-Atta of The Trace and Soraya Nadia McDonald of the Washington Post so you wouldn’t have to.

We were originally planning to have Deadspin’s Greg Howard on the podcast to talk about race and sports journalism — with our peg being the series of articles he wrote about the woes of The Undefeated, the troubled, much-delayed race, culture and sports site from ESPN helmed by Jason Whitlock. Whitlock has been one of the most famous and controversial sportswriters in America, having built his polarizing career on his essays connecting sports to the evils of black pathology. He could be petty and ugly, like when he wrote that Serena Williams would never be an all-time great because she was fat and lazy (“[S]eriously, how else can Serena fill out her size 16 shorts without grazing at her stall between matches?” he wrote). And he could be simplistic and scolding, as in diatribes about the evils inherent to female basketball players dunking or black people’s use of the word “nigger.”)

Howard’s articles argue that the enmity Whitlock earned from black journos and writers for this schtick made it nearly impossible for him to find staffers for his site despite ESPN’s deep pockets. It’s hard to say how much Howard’s articles mattered in this, but this summer ESPN removed Whitlock from the Undefeated, although it let him remain at ESPN as a columnist. The future of The Undefeated, whose launch has been pushed back for nearly two years, was even murkier than ever.

So that’s we wanted to talk about with Greg, as well what all this meant for these kind of big, black-focused projects at mainstream media outlets. But then, earlier this month, ESPN finally fired Whitlock altogether. Since then he’s has landed at Fox Sports, and he’s spent a lot of his time going after the people he thinks he were responsible for the end of his ESPN career — especially Greg, whom he called “Deadspin’s black mascot, a clever, updated Jayson Blair.” Whitlock surfaced an old police report in which Greg was arrested for a violent encounter with a female bartender in Baltimore. (Greg, in turn, responded with a blistering post on his personal blog: “To be an Uncle Tom is to adhere to a specific kind of evil, one that requires foresight and intent. You’re not evil. You just don’t know what you’re talking about, and you’re too lazy to go find out.”) So we do get to some of those big questions about race and sportswriting, but not before we dig into this bizarre beef. Greg has been on the Whitlock beat, in some capacity, for more than year, and it was clear from the conversation that he had with Terryn, Joel and me that he was a bit tired of it. “This is the last thing I’ll ever say about Jason Whitlock,” Howard told us. Guess we’ll find out.